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Tails 4.16 is out

Changes and updates

  • Update Tor Browser to 10.0.12.

  • Update Thunderbird to 78.7.0.

  • Update Linux to 5.10.13. This should improve the support for newer hardware (graphics, Wi-Fi, and so on).

  • Update Tor to 0.4.5.5.

Fixed problems

  • Stop focusing on the Cancel button by default when downloading an upgrade to prevent canceling the download by mistake. (#18072)

For more details, read our changelog.

Known issues

  • Automatic upgrades are broken from Tails 4.14 and earlier.

    To upgrade from Tails 4.14 or earlier, you can either:

    • Do a manual upgrade.

    • Fix the automatic upgrade from a terminal. To do so:

      1. Start Tails and set up an administration password.

      2. In a terminal, execute the following command:

        torsocks curl --silent https://gitlab.tails.boum.org/tails/tails/-/raw/master/config/chroot_local-includes/usr/share/tails/certs/lets-encrypt-r3.pem \
| sudo tee --append /usr/local/etc/ssl/certs/tails.boum.org-CA.pem \
&& systemctl --user restart tails-upgrade-frontend

        This command is a single command that wraps across several lines. Copy and paste the entire block at once and make sure that it executes as a single command.

      3. About 30 seconds later, you should be prompted to upgrade to the latest version of Tails. If no prompt appear, you might already be running the latest version of Tails.

See the list of long-standing issues.

Get Tails 4.16

To upgrade your Tails USB stick and keep your persistent storage

  • Automatic upgrades are broken from Tails 4.14 and earlier. See the known issue above.

  • Automatic upgrades are available from Tails 4.15 or later to 4.16.

  • If you cannot do an automatic upgrade or if Tails fails to start after an automatic upgrade, please try to do a manual upgrade.

To install Tails on a new USB stick

Follow our installation instructions:

The Persistent Storage on the USB stick will be lost if you install instead of upgrading.

To download only

If you don't need installation or upgrade instructions, you can download Tails 4.16 directly:

What's coming up?

Tails 4.17 is scheduled for March 23.

Have a look at our roadmap to see where we are heading to.

We need your help and there are many ways to contribute to Tails (donating is only one of them). Come talk to us!

Posted 2021-02-22 Tags:
Tails report for January, 2021

This month we have published our plans for 2021, make sure to check them if you are interested on the next steps for Tails.

This is the first time ever that there's more than a million Tails boots in a single month! How do we know this?

Releases

Tails 4.15 was released on January 26:

  • Fix support for the Ledger hardware wallets in Electrum. (#18080)
  • Fix sharing mobile data, also called USB tethering, on iOS 14 or later. (#18097)
  • Clarify the error message when starting from a USB stick that is too small. (#18073)

Tails 4.15.1 was released on January 28 (emergency release):

This emergency release fixed a major security vulnerability in sudo, CVE-2021-3156, that allowed normal users to gain root privileges.

Tails 4.16 is scheduled for February 23.

Code

  • #18123: We started implementing changes to make the onion-grater more robust. Onion-grater is a tor controller filter that makes it possible for us to write fine-grained rules about what a particular application can do with tor. The controller allows changing almost everything about how tor runs, so we need to be careful about letting applications access it. For the curious: the solution involves network namespaces.

  • This work is also leading to fix other issues, because until now onion-grater was unable to handle lost connections to the tor controller, as in #11535 where tor bridge mode fails when using Unsafe Browser to get bridges, or #16993 where the circuit view is broken on the Tor Browser after reconnecting to the tor network.

  • We started work to fix the keyboard selection that is broken with some languages.

Documentation and website

User experience

We have been doing usability testing for our future work on rewriting the Persistent Storage into Python.

Hot topics on our help desk

  1. Users still have problems importing GPG keys.

  2. Users have reported some problems doing backups. We are happy that more users are doing backups, although we are not sure still of what is happening. See here for more information, and please comment if you had problems while doing backups as well.

  3. Some users get a weird 'initramfs no system found' error, and cannot boot with USB sticks configured as fixed disks. We thought this was not a common problem anymore, but apparently this is still happening with many USB sticks. Hopefully our new documentation about starting Tails from an external hard disk will help them.

Outreach

  • We have been talking about outsourcing Tails merchandising as we are not doing any merchandising lately because of the effort, but many users would like to support Tails in this way. More information at #18141.

On-going discussions

Translations

We have advanced on the integration of the website with the translation platform. Now the staging website gets built daily, with suggestions that will break the build being skipped, and we also have automated tests that help us spot when the translations break the website.

All the website

  • de: 27% (1864) strings translated, 14% strings fuzzy
  • es: 52% (3569) strings translated, 5% strings fuzzy
  • fa: 20% (1377) strings translated, 12% strings fuzzy
  • fr: 79% (5400) strings translated, 7% strings fuzzy
  • it: 31% (2167) strings translated, 8% strings fuzzy
  • pt: 18% (1286) strings translated, 9% strings fuzzy

Core pages of the website

  • de: 45% (942) strings translated, 23% strings fuzzy
  • es: 89% (1880) strings translated, 4% strings fuzzy
  • fa: 19% (417) strings translated, 15% strings fuzzy
  • fr: 79% (1668) strings translated, 9% strings fuzzy
  • it: 59% (1242) strings translated, 18% strings fuzzy
  • pt: 39% (831) strings translated, 14% strings fuzzy

Core pages of the website for languages not activated on the website yet

  • ar: 7% (164) strings translated, 8% strings fuzzy
  • ca: 7% (165) strings translated, 7% strings fuzzy
  • id: 6% (135) strings translated, 4% strings fuzzy
  • pl: 7% (167) strings translated, 6% strings fuzzy
  • ru: 8% (179) strings translated, 6% strings fuzzy
  • sr_Latn: 5% (111) strings translated, 4% strings fuzzy
  • tr: 8% (176) strings translated, 6% strings fuzzy
  • zh: 11% (236) strings translated, 7% strings fuzzy
  • zh_TW: 22% (466) strings translated, 13% strings fuzzy

Metrics

  • Tails has been started more than 1,006,718 times this month. This makes 32,400 boots a day on average.

This is the first time ever that there's more than a million Tails boots in a single month.

How do we know this?

Posted 2021-02-10
Tails 4.15.1 is out

This release is an emergency release to fix a security vulnerability in sudo.

You should upgrade as soon as possible.

Changes and updates

Included software

  • Update sudo to 1.8.27-1+deb10u3, which fixes CVE-2021-3156, a major vulnerability that allows normal users to gain root privileges.

Known issues

  • Automatic upgrades are broken from Tails 4.14 and earlier.

    To upgrade from Tails 4.14 or earlier, you can either:

    • Do a manual upgrade.

    • Fix the automatic upgrade from a terminal. To do so:

      1. Start Tails and set up an administration password.

      2. In a terminal, execute the following command:

        torsocks curl --silent https://gitlab.tails.boum.org/tails/tails/-/raw/master/config/chroot_local-includes/usr/share/tails/certs/lets-encrypt-r3.pem \
| sudo tee --append /usr/local/etc/ssl/certs/tails.boum.org-CA.pem \
&& systemctl --user restart tails-upgrade-frontend

        This command is a single command that wraps across several lines. Copy and paste the entire block at once and make sure that it executes as a single command.

      3. About 30 seconds later, you should be prompted to upgrade to the latest version of Tails. If no prompt appear, you might already be running the latest version of Tails.

See the list of long-standing issues.

Get Tails 4.15.1

To upgrade your Tails USB stick and keep your persistent storage

  • Automatic upgrades are broken from Tails 4.14 and earlier. See the known issue above.

  • Automatic upgrades are available from Tails 4.15 to 4.15.1.

  • If you cannot do an automatic upgrade or if Tails fails to start after an automatic upgrade, please try to do a manual upgrade.

To install Tails on a new USB stick

Follow our installation instructions:

The Persistent Storage on the USB stick will be lost if you install instead of upgrading.

To download only

If you don't need installation or upgrade instructions, you can download Tails 4.15.1 directly:

What's coming up?

Tails 4.16 is scheduled for February 23.

Have a look at our roadmap to see where we are heading to.

We need your help and there are many ways to contribute to Tails (donating is only one of them). Come talk to us!

Posted 2021-01-28 Tags:
Tails 4.15 is out

This release fixes known security vulnerabilities. You should upgrade as soon as possible.

New features

  • Add a Don't Show Again button to the security notification when starting Tails in a virtual machine.

Changes and updates

  • Update Tor Browser to 10.0.9.

  • Update Thunderbird to 78.6.0.

  • Update Linux to 5.9.15. This should improve the support for newer hardware (graphics, Wi-Fi, etc.).

Fixed problems

  • Fix support for the Ledger hardware wallets in Electrum. (#18080)

  • Fix sharing mobile data, also called USB tethering, on iOS 14 or later. (#18097)

  • Clarify the error message when starting from a USB stick that is too small. (#18073)

For more details, read our changelog.

Known issues

  • Automatic upgrades are broken from Tails 4.14 and earlier.

    To upgrade from Tails 4.14 or earlier, you can either:

    • Do a manual upgrade.

    • Fix the automatic upgrade from a terminal. To do so:

      1. Start Tails and set up an administration password.

      2. In a terminal, execute the following command:

        torsocks curl --silent https://gitlab.tails.boum.org/tails/tails/-/raw/master/config/chroot_local-includes/usr/share/tails/certs/lets-encrypt-r3.pem \
| sudo tee --append /usr/local/etc/ssl/certs/tails.boum.org-CA.pem \
&& systemctl --user restart tails-upgrade-frontend

        This command is a single command that wraps across several lines. Copy and paste the entire block at once and make sure that it executes as a single command.

      3. About 30 seconds later, you should be prompted to upgrade to the latest version of Tails. If no prompt appear, you might already be running the latest version of Tails.

See the list of long-standing issues.

Get Tails 4.15

To upgrade your Tails USB stick and keep your persistent storage

  • Automatic upgrades are broken from Tails 4.14 and earlier. See the known issue above.

  • If you cannot do an automatic upgrade or if Tails fails to start after an automatic upgrade, please try to do a manual upgrade.

To install Tails on a new USB stick

Follow our installation instructions:

The Persistent Storage on the USB stick will be lost if you install instead of upgrading.

To download only

If you don't need installation or upgrade instructions, you can download Tails 4.15 directly:

What's coming up?

Tails 4.16 is scheduled for February 23.

Have a look at our roadmap to see where we are heading to.

We need your help and there are many ways to contribute to Tails (donating is only one of them). Come talk to us!

Posted 2021-01-26 Tags:
Our plans for 2021

In 2021, we want to focus on improving some of the very core features of Tails, especially for censorship circumvention.

To support our work in 2021, take a minute now to donate and fight surveillance and censorship!

Censorship circumvention

We want to completely redesign how to start Tor and configure Tor bridges.

This will make it easier for people in countries where accessing Tor is blocked to circumvent censorship. According to data from the Tor project, the top 5 countries by users of Tor bridges are Russia, Iran, the US, Belarus, and China.

Persistent Storage

We want to improve the interface of the Persistent Storage settings.

Improving the Persistent Storage was your top priority when we surveyed our users in July. We want to start by improving the usability of its core features and rewriting this 9-year-old Perl application into Python GTK+. This will make it possible to improve it faster in the future.

We also want to make it possible to persist Tor bridges.

Security and maintenance

To improve the security of all applications in Tails, we want to migrate to Wayland. Wayland is a new display system for Linux that better controls how each application interacts with the rest of the system.

For example, Wayland will fix how the Unsafe Browser can be used to deanonymize you.

We will also release Tails 5.0, based on Debian 11 (Bullseye) at the end of 2021. It will bring new versions of most of the software included in Tails.

Help us fight surveillance and censorship

All our work is made possible by donations from people like you. We particularly appreciate monthly and yearly donations, even the smallest ones. Because they help us plan our work, they are the most valuable for the sustainability of Tails.

To support our work in 2021, take a minute now to donate and fight surveillance and censorship!

Donate
Posted 2021-01-08 Tags:
Tails report for December, 2020

In memoriam of Karsten Loesing

We join the Tor project in mourning Karsten Loesing. Our sincere condolences to Karsten's family and colleagues.

Those of us who were lucky enough to cross Karsten's path remember him as a very kind, thoughtful, and smart person.

Rest in peace, Karsten.

Releases

The following changes were introduced in Tails 4.15:

  • Add support for the Ledger hardware wallets in Electrum. (#15353)

  • Remove the Unifont font. (!263)

  • Fix Additional Software by updating the APT key for deb.torproject.org. (#18042)

  • Fix changing the administration password stored in the Persistent Storage. (#18018)

  • Fix opening the Persistent Storage of another Tails USB stick in the Files browser. (#18050)

  • Restore automatically a GnuPG public keyring from its backup when it gets corrupt. (#17807)

🎉 New core developer 🎂

Today, we celebrate the arrival in our Foundations Team of a new member: boyska. His skills and experience in operating systems, software development, and collective projects will:

  • Accelerate development of new features, user experience improvements, and bug fixes.

  • Make our day-to-day maintenance work more sustainable.

    This work has no visible impact most of the time, except that Tails is still alive after more than a decade, and here to stay!

  • Decrease our reliance on a tiny number of key persons.

    This is one important step we're taking, among others, towards making Tails a healthier project.

I'm boyska, a fellow who always loved computers. When I realized the profound social implications of technology, I tried to make my part: that's how I got involved with free software, security and hacking in general. A post-it note in my brain remembers me that computing should be fun, not scary.

Additionally, we would like to thank:

  • the thousands of people whose donation allowed us to fund this new position

    Please consider donating today to fight surveillance and censorship.

  • the dozens of people who applied to this job offer

    It's been truly heart-warming to see so many great applicants interested in working with us.

Welcome, boyska! :)

Code

  • We implemented a mechanism for adding a "Don't Show Again" button to some notifications. We'll try it out in Tails 4.15 for the warning displayed when starting Tails in a virtual machine; then we'll iterate from there.

  • We finished porting our Python code to Python 3. Yeah!

  • We made plans for rewriting Persistent Storage in Python, making it compatible with Wayland, and redesigning its UX from scratch.

Documentation and website

User experience

  • Started analyzing the search queries on our website, following a methodology by Susan Farrell. (#11649)

  • Started preparing the redesign of the Persistent Storage that we'll work on in January. (#15572)

  • Investigated what it would take to stop distributing ISO images:

    • #18047: Users unintentionally install ISO to USB instead of the .img
    • #18054: Distribute USB images by default for all virtual machines
    • #18055: Stop distributing ISO images

  • Added some depth to the buttons on our website. (#15111)

Funding

Grants

  • Our proposal to the UXFund to work on a replacement for Tor Launcher was approved buy scaled down by 20%.

Donations

  • Received 57.8k€ from 88 donations at CCT since the beginning of the campaign.

    It's 70% more donations, that's the important part, and 599% more money thanks to a 50k€ donation from some crypto trading company, that's the big cherry on top of the cake!

  • Blogged about our achievements in 2020.

Sponsors

  • Renamed "partners" as "sponsors" after DeepOnion listed Tails as their partner on their website.

    The word "partners" implies reciprocity and a deeper relationship, while the word "sponsor" doesn't and is more accurate, honest, and common.

  • Got invited to the Lifetime Raffle of ProtonMail.

Outreach

Past events

  • Tails and Tor were presented (among other tools) to journalism students at Sciences Po Rennes (Rennes, France) as part of their digital safety lessons.

Translations

All the website

  • fr: 79% (5378) strings translated, 7% strings fuzzy
  • es: 48% (3273) strings translated, 6% strings fuzzy
  • it: 28% (1945) strings translated, 9% strings fuzzy
  • de: 27% (1829) strings translated, 14% strings fuzzy
  • fa: 20% (1359) strings translated, 12% strings fuzzy
  • pt: 18% (1266) strings translated, 9% strings fuzzy

Core pages of the website

  • es: 82% (1741) strings translated, 6% strings fuzzy
  • fr: 79% (1676) strings translated, 10% strings fuzzy
  • it: 54% (1151) strings translated, 20% strings fuzzy
  • de: 44% (935) strings translated, 24% strings fuzzy
  • pt: 38% (818) strings translated, 14% strings fuzzy
  • fa: 19% (407) strings translated, 15% strings fuzzy

Core pages of the website for languages not activated on the website yet

  • zh_TW: 21% (451) strings translated, 14% strings fuzzy
  • zh: 10% (218) strings translated, 8% strings fuzzy
  • tr: 7% (155) strings translated, 7% strings fuzzy
  • ca: 7% (153) strings translated, 8% strings fuzzy
  • ru: 7% (152) strings translated, 7% strings fuzzy
  • pl: 7% (150) strings translated, 6% strings fuzzy
  • ar: 7% (146) strings translated, 8% strings fuzzy
  • id: 5% (115) strings translated, 5% strings fuzzy
  • sr_Latn: 4% (93) strings translated, 4% strings fuzzy

Metrics

  • Tails has been started more than 978 192 times this month. This makes 31 554 boots a day on average.

How do we know this?

Posted 2021-01-08
Our achievements in 2020

Despite everything, 2020 was a great year for Tails. We released major improvements that made Tails easier to use by the people who need it the most.

If you enjoyed our work in 2020, take a minute now to donate and fight surveillance and censorship!

From the number of automatic upgrades, we know that Tails was used 20% more in 2020 than in 2019, which is our largest increase since 2016. From March to May only, when the lockdown measures were the strictest worldwide, Tails got used 10% more than ever before.

Today, Tails is used close to 32 000 times each day.

Simplified starting procedure

We added support for Secure Boot in April. Secure Boot doesn't really make your computer any safer but it forced most users to edit their BIOS in complicated and risky ways to be able to use Tails (or Linux in general). Now you don't have to edit the BIOS anymore!

We also documented the Shift+Restart procedure to start Tails from Windows 8 or 10 using the Start menu. Now you don't have to hammer that Boot Menu key anymore!

All this dramatically simplified our starting instructions for PCs.

Better upgrades

Because we know that upgrades are one of the most painful aspects of using Tails, we released significant improvements to automatic upgrades in January. We made automatic upgrades:

  • Available from all prior versions to the latest version in a single upgrade.

    For example, you can upgrade from 4.10 to 4.14 directly, without having to first upgrade to 4.12 anymore.

  • Available endlessly between minor versions of Tails.

    For example, you don't have to do a manual upgrade anymore after a few upgrades. You will only have to do a manual upgrade between major versions, for example to upgrade to Tails 5.0 at the end of 2021.

  • Use less memory.

  • Better documented, especially manual upgrades.

But also…

  • We completely redesigned our Home page to explain better what is Tails and why people should use it.

  • We made it possible to save the settings of the Welcome Screen in the Persistent Storage: language, keyboard, and additional settings.

  • We simplified the verification procedure on our download page by replacing the Tails Verification extension with similar JavaScript code that runs directly on the page.

    People without JavaScript are also now pointed to the checksum of the download.

  • We added support for the hardware cryptocurrency wallets Trezor and Ledger.

Under the hood

Unfortunately, the biggest part of our work doesn't lead to such major changes for our users. Tails is an endless work of updates and maintenance: publishing a new release every 4 weeks to fix security vulnerabilities, adapting to new versions of the underlying software, keeping our website and development infrastructure secure and reliable, etc.

  • We published more releases than ever. In 2020 we released 15 new versions of Tails to always have your back covered!

    At the end of 2019, Firefox switched from releasing a new version every 6 weeks to releasing a new version every 4 weeks. And so did we.

  • We streamlined our release process by automating its most time-consuming parts. This reduced the work needed to publish a new release of Tails from 2 full days of work to only 1 day.

    In the long run, this will help us spend more time on what really matters to our users and allow us to react faster to emergencies in case of security vulnerabilities.

  • We migrated to GitLab and saw many more of you jump in and give us a hand!

Help us fight surveillance and censorship

All our work is made possible by donations from people like you. We particularly appreciate monthly and yearly donations, even the smallest ones. Because they help us plan our work, they are the most valuable for the sustainability of Tails.

If you enjoyed our work in 2020, take a minute now to donate and fight surveillance and censorship!

Donate
Posted 2020-12-23 Tags:
Tails report for November, 2020

Releases

The following changes were introduced in Tails 4.13:

  • Update Thunderbird from 68.12 to 78.4.2. Thunderbird 78 replaces the Enigmail extension with built-in support for OpenPGP encryption. If you used Enigmail before Tails 4.13, follow our instructions to migrate from Enigmail to Thunderbird 78.

  • Add a button to restart Tails at the end of creating the Persistent Storage. (#16384)

  • Only include translations for languages that are available in the Welcome Screen. This reduces the size of the download by 5%. (#17139)

  • Make the root directory of the Persistent Storage only readable by the root user. (#7465)

  • Users of the Dotfiles feature of the Persistent Storage can choose Places ▸ Dotfiles to open the /live/persistence/TailsData_unlocked/dotfiles folder in the Files browser.

  • Enable TCP timestamps. This might increase stability on slower Internet connections. (#17491)

Release management

A year ago, when we learned we had to switch to a 4-weeks release cycle to follow Mozilla's lead, we acknowledged that the need to streamline our release process, in order to make this part of our work more sustainable. In November, the Tails Release Managers team had a sprint focused on this very topic, during which we identified a great number of issues and fixed most of them! :)

For details, read the sprint report.

Code

  • We had a meeting to prioritize & organize work on our next big things. We decided to first focus on:

    • Wayland blockers, that can be addressed incrementally.

    • Deal with deprecation of Tor Launcher (#17215)

    • Rewrite Persistent Storage GUI frontend (#17803

  • We scheduled a sprint in January to bootstrap our work on the RIPE grant and on Wayland blockers.

  • We re-bootstrapped our experiment on sharing our team's "front desk" workload.

  • We started reorganizing our team meetings.

  • We now require Debian 10 "Buster" or newer for running our test suite (#17842), and started to take benefit from this change.

  • We automated a great part of the tests we do as part of release quality assurance.

Documentation and website

User experience

Hot topics on our help desk

  1. Touchpad and keyboard do not work in Asus computers
  2. Some users lost their OpenPGP keys but could recover them from the backup file
  3. Panda Wireless adaptors stopped working

Funding

  • The first numbers that we could analyze for the donation campaign look very promising compared to the same period last year:

    • PayPal: 34% more donations, 28% more money
    • Bitcoin: 62% more donations
    • Monero: 205% more donations

  • We programmed our biggest Twitter campaign ever: 34 tweets, 1 tweet every 2 days at most. Half of them are not direct calls to donate but rather build up on the new Home and About pages to talk about the main properties of Tails.

  • We decided not to blog about the donation campaign for now because our team is seriously overworked. It doesn't seem to have impacted the campaign significantly. We might still blog about achievements and plans in December.

  • Our grant to RIPE on improving Tails for censorship circumvention was approved.

Outreach

Past events

  • Privacy Week 2020: Tails.

  • Tails was mentioned in another Privacy Week 2020 speech: How internet works

  • Tails was presented (among other tools) to journalism students at Sciences Po Rennes (Rennes, France).

Translations

All the website

  • de: 28% (1897) strings translated, 14% strings fuzzy
  • es: 51% (3392) strings translated, 6% strings fuzzy
  • fa: 21% (1396) strings translated, 13% strings fuzzy
  • fr: 78% (5224) strings translated, 8% strings fuzzy
  • it: 28% (1879) strings translated, 10% strings fuzzy
  • pt: 19% (1300) strings translated, 9% strings fuzzy

Core pages of the website

  • de: 45% (970) strings translated, 23% strings fuzzy
  • es: 86% (1844) strings translated, 5% strings fuzzy
  • fa: 19% (426) strings translated, 15% strings fuzzy
  • fr: 76% (1633) strings translated, 12% strings fuzzy
  • it: 50% (1075) strings translated, 21% strings fuzzy
  • pt: 38% (822) strings translated, 14% strings fuzzy

Core pages of the website for languages not activated on the website yet

  • ar: 7% (165) strings translated, 8% strings fuzzy
  • ca: 8% (174) strings translated, 8% strings fuzzy
  • id: 6% (138) strings translated, 5% strings fuzzy
  • pl: 7% (166) strings translated, 6% strings fuzzy
  • ru: 8% (182) strings translated, 7% strings fuzzy
  • sr_Latn: 5% (114) strings translated, 4% strings fuzzy
  • tr: 8% (172) strings translated, 7% strings fuzzy
  • zh: 10% (222) strings translated, 8% strings fuzzy
  • zh_TW: 21% (460) strings translated, 13% strings fuzzy

Metrics

  • Tails has been started more than 947 384 times this month. This makes 31 579 boots a day on average.

How do we know this?

Posted 2020-12-16
Tails 4.14 is out

This release fixes many security vulnerabilities. You should upgrade as soon as possible.

Changes and updates

  • Add support for the Ledger hardware wallets in Electrum. (#15353)

  • Update Tor Browser to 10.0.7.

  • Update Thunderbird to 78.5.1.

  • Update Linux to 5.9. This should improve the support for newer hardware (graphics, Wi-Fi, etc.).

  • Remove the Unifont font. (!263)

Fixed problems

  • Fix Additional Software by updating the APT key for deb.torproject.org. (#18042)

  • Fix changing the administration password stored in the Persistent Storage. (#18018)

  • Fix opening the Persistent Storage of another Tails USB stick in the Files browser. (#18050)

  • Restore automatically a GnuPG public keyring from its backup when it gets corrupt. (#17807)

For more details, read our changelog.

Known issues

  • Ledger wallets are not detected by Electrum, with the following error message returned. (#18080)

    "No hardware device detected"

    Please try to execute the following command in a root terminal before starting Electrum:

     apt update && apt install python3-btchip/testing

See the list of long-standing issues.

Get Tails 4.14

To upgrade your Tails USB stick and keep your persistent storage

  • Automatic upgrades are available from Tails 4.2 or later to 4.14.

  • If you cannot do an automatic upgrade or if Tails fails to start after an automatic upgrade, please try to do a manual upgrade.

To install Tails on a new USB stick

Follow our installation instructions:

The Persistent Storage on the USB stick will be lost if you install instead of upgrading.

To download only

If you don't need installation or upgrade instructions, you can download Tails 4.14 directly:

What's coming up?

Tails 4.15 is scheduled for January 26.

Have a look at our roadmap to see where we are heading to.

We need your help and there are many ways to contribute to Tails (donating is only one of them). Come talk to us!

Posted 2020-12-15 Tags:
Deprecation of the Tails Verification extension

Today, we are retiring the Tails Verification browser extension that used to be advertised on our download page. We are replacing it with similar JavaScript code that now runs directly on the page.

This new verification procedure is:

  • Simpler and faster for first-time users - Compatible with more web browsers, for example, Edge and Safari - As secure as the Tails Verification extension

From the logs on our website, it seems like only a minority of downloads are currently being verified. We believe that this simplified verification procedure will greatly increase the number of downloads being verified and improve the security of our users.

Users of the Tails Verification extension can safely remove it from their browser. They will be reminded to do so on the download page.

We will remove the Tails Verification extension from the Firefox and Chrome stores in a few days.

The other 2 verification techniques are still available:

  • If you download Tails using BitTorrent, your BitTorrent client automatically verifies the checksum of the Tails image when the download finishes.

  • If you know OpenPGP, you can verify your Tails image using an OpenPGP signature.

Special thanks to Mike Meixler who donated his time to help us with the verification JavaScript!

In the future, this simplification will allow us to further simplify the download page and installation instructions. We also want to research how to make the verification faster. If you know WebAssembly, see if you can help us speed up the checksum computation.

See also our design document on the security and threat model of the download verification.

Posted 2020-12-09 Tags:
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